I’ve mentioned before how the Soviets did not wait until the Cold War to start copying western military technologies. For instance, the Tupolev Tu-4 bomber was a Boeing B-29 Superfortress.
Our own perfidious Buckethead knew quite a bit about that piece of history, because his father wrote an Air and Space piece about it.
And now Buckethead’s dad’s book — Red Phoenix Rising — has come out, and the Washington Times has reviewed it:
So when German attack planes appeared, they found hundreds of VVS aircraft — bombers, fighters and reconnaissance planes — “parked in long rows, as if on display.” In the course of about 20 minutes, the Soviet western air district lost 347 planes of 409 deployed.
Losses were equally severe elsewhere. Even now, exact figures are difficult to come by. German claims — up to 1,200 aircraft the first days — were so high that even the air commander, Hermann Goering, “a man often prone to hyperbole,” suspected exaggeration. He demanded further study. “The subsequent recount, to his amazement, added 300 Soviet aircraft to the original figure.” (One Russian archive source cited puts the two-day loss at 3,822 aircraft, versus just 78 enemy downed.)
As a crash aircraft-manufacturing program got under way, surviving aviators made do with what they could. Some pilots — volunteers — opted to ram German aircraft. Relatively slow-moving German bombers were a favored target. The Soviet pilot did this by “approaching from the rear, adjusting the speed to the enemy plane at close quarters, and then pushing the tip of his propeller into the opponent’s rudder or elevator.” Once contact was made, the Soviet pilot would drop away quickly. Results were never predictable. “Frequently both fell into a spin.” As the authors write, ramming “reflected a higher calling of patriotism, the willingness to place one’s own life in harm’s way to achieve a tactical victory.”
A frantic building program in the Urals, far from the battlefronts, in time enabled the VVS to achieve numerical parity with the Luftwaffe. Hitler’s military, meanwhile, was so overextended that his air force could not replace lost planes. The Soviets also made wide use of camouflage to conceal likely targets. “The Kremlin walls were disguised as apartment facades with the use of contrasting colors.” Netting was draped over the golden cupolas. “Lenin’s tomb was reshaped with scaffolding to appear as a two-story building.”